Giving chase
New Orleans writer Pia Z. Ehrhardt tackles female desire with gusto
Sunday, June 17, 2007
By Susan Larson
Book editor - Times Picayune

FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES

All readers recognize it when they hear it -- the siren song of the truth teller, the voice that will lead you someplace new, summoning you to an experience that may be dangerous and will certainly be unforgettable. And once you've heard it, that voice, you're along for the ride, wherever it goes, listening, seduced. The stories in Pia Z. Ehrhardt's "Famous Fathers & Other Stories" have that powerful allure.

In "Running the Room," the opening story in this collection, the narrator, Beck, is aiding and abetting her mother in a love affair with a city councilman. She's not only along for the ride, she's driving the getaway car. "Since I was a kid," she says, "I've always hated going to the airport just to deliver and fetch. I'm always ready to fly."

And that's what draws the reader to these characters -- they're always ready to rocket into the unknown at warp speed, always ready to break the boundaries, cross the lines. Whether it's a woman having an affair with her husband's brother, a daughter who's using her mother's love affair as a cover for her own night of exploring the unknown, or a wife who's jealous of her husband's affection for her sister -- these are women at the edge, ready to take that step. Brave or foolhardy? Who can say? But always interesting. What would it be like to live as if you had nothing to lose?

Ehrhardt, a native New Orleanian, sets many of her stories here. In "Running the Room," the mother's love affair is conducted at the Airport Hilton, with detours to Bourbon Street, while her daughter attends classes at Delgado in preparation for opening a restaurant. There's a detour to Pat O'Brien's complete with "vacationing fools." In "How It Floods," a woman has an affair with a man who works for the levee board as a hurricane approaches in the background; "I like men who know things," she says. And in "Intermediate Goals," the protagonist, Carrie, leaves her husband -- not for "another man," but for "the next man." She signs up to be an Angola Angel, consults with a voodoo priestess on North Rampart Street, gets a tattoo. But New Orleans, in these stories, is simply -- and refreshingly -- a fact of life, glass beads tossed in a closet somewhere else, at times. Ehrhardt's characters, not her setting, are what the reader must reckon with.

In these stories, we meet the women we often wonder about, certainly the ones we like to talk about. What's it like to go off and leave your three children behind with your husband? What will happen if you step into that car, thinking you're taking a ride to school, and end up a state away with a bagger from the Piggly Wiggly? What will your father the mayor think if you have an affair with his driver? What if you did really have an affair with a guy from the AA meeting? What would the next morning's conversation sound like? What is the cost of forgiveness? Higher than what you might think.

In the title story, when the young girl confesses her affair with her father's driver, she grabs her sister's camera to capture the moment. "I want to take the pictures for a change. I've made history because I will never say anything worse. Sex was my last true weapon, a big, dumb club, so easy to use. I hold out the camera, and there they are, smaller and stopped. Click: My mother's anger. Click: My father's fear. Click: My sister's delight. We are the Jacksons at dinner, stirred up like wasps, and I've made a big mistake."

Then there's that choice of the perfect tattoo -- "the word 'oh' written -- ohohohohohohohoho -- in a bracelet around my right wrist, because it looks like surprise, doubt, and laughing all at the same time." That's the heady cocktail in these stories, the joy of the wish fulfilled with a chaser of doubt.

Female desire -- for sex, for power -- is a tricky subject, but Ehrhardt doesn't romanticize that sense of yearning, that lust for what you want when you want it, that itchy, urgent need to see what happens next -- and not just to see it happen, but to make it happen. She celebrates that power, explores its truths. Her stories will leave you breathless and wanting more. Now.

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Labels: Birdsong